Libby Davis

“When she was a girl, and still growing, ravenous, whenever there had been a cake - a sponge cake, dusted with sugar, which Mrs. Hill had conjured up out of eggs and flour and creamy butter - Sarah would never even let herself look at it, because she knew that it was not for her. Instead, she would carry it upstairs to be rendered into crumbs, and the crumbs lifted from the plate by a moistened Bennet finger, and the empty smeared plate carried back again. So Sarah would stare instead at the carpet underneath her feet, or at the painting of a horse with a strangely small head that hung at the end of the hall, or the rippled yellow curtains in the parlour, and would do her best not to breathe, not to inhale the scent of vanilla or lemon or almonds; event to glance at the cake was an impossible agony. And for months, she realized, James had hardly looked at her at all.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without the rain.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -categories like that- won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“It's delightful when your imaginations come true, isn't it?”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables